ISTANBUL - A group of lawyers, scientists and bureaucrats met last week
on the banks of the Tigris outside Hasankeyf, a town in southeastern
Anatolia that goes back several millenniums and is slated for submersion
by a dam under construction downriver.

The meeting was the official start of an investigation, ordered by a
Turkish regional court, to assess the cultural value of Hasankeyf and
the damage that the Ilisu dam project would inflict on it.

Raising his voice above the yapping of local dogs, Judge Mustafa Arik
swore in three scientists - a hydraulic engineer and two archaeologists -
appointed by his administrative court in neighboring Diyarbakir,
television footage of the event by the Dogan news agency shows. The
court has the power to halt construction of the dam. The fate of
Hasankeyf and of one of Turkey's biggest and most controversial
hydro-power projects now hangs on the experts' report, due within three
months.

The inquiry may signal the end of decades of battling over the project,
which the government says will bring jobs and wealth to an impoverished
region, but which opponents say is environmentally and culturally
destructive.

European lenders pulled out of the €1.1 billion, or $1.5 billion,
project in July 2009, citing concerns about environmental impact,
resettlement policies and the destruction of cultural treasures. But
Ankara rallied quickly, raising domestic financing to fill the gap,
resuming construction on the dam last year and even beginning to
resettle the population in the catchment area.

The project is now moving ahead at high speed. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has asked the building consortium to complete the dam by mid-2014, two
years ahead of target. But the case before the court in Diyarbakir could
yet throw a wrench in the works.

As the surveyors struck out for a first ramble around Hasankeyf last
week, they were trailed by the litigants - a dozen government lawyers
and officials charged with defending the dam project and the sole
plaintiff, Murat Cano.

For Mr. Cano, a lawyer from Istanbul, this inquiry has been a long time
coming, as he recounted during an interview in his office last week. He
filed his complaint in January 2000, arguing that Hasankeyf was
protected by Turkish laws for the preservation of historical and
cultural sites, as well as by the European Convention on the Protection
of the Archaeological Heritage.

"In Hasankeyf, we have Byzantium, we have Rome, we have the Assyrians,
the Arabs, the Seljuks, the Sassanids, the Ottomans - there are relics
of all the civilizations that have existed here in upper Mesopotamia,"
Mr. Cano said. "This cultural heritage does not belong to you or to me,
it belongs to all of us in the world. We are guardians, custodians
only."

The case was shunted around the courts in jurisdiction disputes and
other legal wrangling for more than a decade, until the Diyarbakir court
appointed the experts last month.

While delighted that the survey is now under way, Mr. Cano fears that
time is running out. The Culture Ministry, in charge of relocating
monuments from the catchment area and preserving others underwater, "has
absolutely no viable plans" to do so, Mr. Cano said in a second
interview this week, after touring Hasankeyf and the Ilisu construction
site with ministry representatives. "Meanwhile, construction on the dam
is going full steam ahead. They are trying to create a fait accompli."

The dam had been scheduled for completion in 2016, until Mr. Erdogan intervened to speed things up.

"That seems like a very long time to me," Mr. Erdogan said in October at
the inauguration of a new village for the inhabitants of Ilisu, which
is among the 200 settlements that will be inundated. "Let's have it
completed within the first half of the year 2014 at the latest."

The General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works, the government agency
in charge of the project, confirmed Tuesday that it was working to meet
this target. Work on the main body of the dam is to commence next month,
it said in an e-mailed statement.

Conservation work in Hasankeyf, by contrast, is proceeding far more
slowly, as Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay has conceded. "In my opinion
it will take quite some more time," Mr. Gunay said during an interview
last month.

The minister said he had been pressing his cabinet colleagues to find a
"technical solution." "In the case of a unique historical town like
Hasankeyf, I think we should proceed much more carefully and patiently,"
he said.